Communications Manager

Start date: ASAP

Reporting to: Director of Communications

Visa sponsorship: Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants should have the right to work in the UK at the time of application.

Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, right to work, media and social media.

You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by: 6th March

Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we’d welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 160 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.

Apolitical is looking for a versatile Communications Manager to own our contracted communications work, ensuring seamless execution and high-quality delivery for key partners and governments. This role requires project management, writing, attention to detail, and stakeholder management skills.

You’ll be responsible for running and improving communications processes, ensuring that content and campaigns are executed effectively across social media, video and email marketing, and working with our partnerships and events teams. You will also play a key role in coordinating with Apolitical’s partners and internal teams, ensuring smooth delivery and professional engagement.

You’ll also be creating communications and marketing content across a range of Apolitical’s learning programmes such as the Government AI Campus, the Government Energy and Climate Campus, new AI powered tools and products, tracking and project managing deliverables, ensuring good knowledge management, and making sure all comms outputs are delivered with excellence.

This is a great fit if you:

• Enjoy being hands-on with a focus on creating high quality collateral and shipping comms releases
• Are eager to take ownership of creating new systems and processes to help us work more quickly and effectively
• Enjoy thinking strategically about how to make the most of video and social media to build the organisation’s brand with a specific audience
• Can bring a data-informed approach to how you plan and evaluate your work
• Are comfortable and familiar with video editing software such as Premier Pro, FinalCut or AfterEffects
• Can manage multiple projects at once, responding to feedback from multiple stakeholders while taking ownership for the overall outputs
• Enjoy the challenge of writing for different audiences and formats, adapting messages to different contexts and channels
• Are comfortable working in fast-moving environment and can prioritise dynamically
• Are motivated by the idea of working for an ambitious challenger brand that’s hungry to grow and make a positive impact
• Love learning and constantly look to develop your skills
• Relish the uncertainty and unpredictability of working at fast growing company

This likely won’t be the right role if you:

• Are a communications specialist who wants to focus exclusively on strategy or designing campaigns rather than delivering outputs
• Need a highly predictable work environment with specific task allocation. We value flexibility and a capacity to work through uncertainty
• Have never worked with graphic design software like Canva or Figma, or worked closely with design teams. You’ll be delivering lots of carefully-designed assets together with our design team
• Need the structure and benefits of a large organisation
• Like to manage direct reports. This role has lots of interaction with other teams but you’ll be working pretty independently for the foreseeable future

Role remit:

1. Content creation and campaign execution
   • Plan and project manage the execution of communications campaigns, ensuring all deliverables are completed on time and to a high standard
   • Support our busy Events team with communications, working with our Event Marketer to coordinate messaging, collateral, and outreach
   • Monitor and optimise campaign performance, using learnings and analytics to refine content and improve strategy
2. Management and growth of key channels
   • Develop, refine, and distribute marketing and communications collateral, including decks, explainers, reports, press releases, short videos, and promotional materials
   • Lead execution across our priority channels, ensuring consistent, high-quality content and engagement:
   • Short videos - editing short videos for marketing and social media platforms, including simple graphic creation.
   • Social media – actively contributing to our Asana content calendar, creating social media tiles using our template library, scheduling posts and tracking insights and performance. Using our ‘self serve’ Figma template library to create social media tiles
   • Email marketing – Writing and managing monthly thought leadership newsletters, and supporting on company email marketing copy
3. Ensure that all content is clear, engaging, and aligned with our brand and partnership goals
4. Stakeholder coordination
   • Externally, build relationships with Apolitical’s partners, including communications counterparts, senior public servants and media professionals, to deliver impact through effective campaigns and collateral
   • Internally, ringlead across teams (Partnerships, Events, Sales, Product) to ensure internal alignment, quality and speed of delivery
   • Communicate effectively with senior leaders and partners, surfacing priorities and trade-offs and ensuring alignment across teams
5. Process and knowledge management
   • Own and improve communications processes and workflows, ensuring smooth delivery of contracted comms work
   • Maintain knowledge management systems, ensuring key content, templates, and workflows are well-documented, organised, and accessible
   • Track and manage deliverables across multiple client accounts, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks

Don’t meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we’ll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application. These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don’t affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.